Marine geophysical survey systems are used to acquire data regarding Earth formations below a body of water such as a lake or ocean. Some equipment utilized for marine surveying, such as streamers, may become tangled during repositioning (i.e., deployment and/or recovery operations). Tangles typically result from collision of one sensor streamer with another or with one or more sensor streamers and another piece of equipment (e.g., the seismic source, buoys, etc.). Addressing tangles of the sensor streamers is time consuming and therefore costly. As a result, the occurrence of such tangles greatly increases the costs of performing such marine geophysical surveying operations.